Estate Bonnington Gallery, Nottingham 1994

Estate is a sculptural installation that incorporates stereoscopic photography.  Made from precast concrete, five sculptures stand in a row like tower blocks, each with an inspection light clipped to the back, suggesting routine maintenance.  The real function of the light is to illuminate slides held in a stereoscopic viewer.  The sculptures also appear like a group of kneeling figures, as their proportions are based on the human body and the lenses in the viewers are positioned as if like eyes.

The stereoscopic images depict five homogeneous interiors, photographed from the same viewpoint.  They differ only in their furnishings, which accord to the particular occupant’s taste or means.  The work is essentially about urban life.

Neighbourhood Watch Eastern Arts Board, Cambridge 1998

Neighbourhood Watch is a temporary, free standing sculpture sited in the public garden between, two 1960’s residential flats, near the centre of Cambridge.  With the involvement of local residents, Jonathan Bennett has created an innovative artwork which incorporates face casts and stereoscopic photography.

Bennett has cast the faces of six residents and set them into vertical slabs of concrete, corresponding to each participant’s height.  Through the eyes of the faces, a pair of transparencies can be viewed, which depict the resident’s living space in stereo vision.

Each homogeneous interior has been photographed from the same predetermined viewpoint. They differ only in their furnishings, which accord to the particular occupant’s taste or means. 

The sculpture at first appears minimalist in style, but the face casts and the personal details revealed in the photographs give the work a human resonance.  As an outsider, we are not usually allowed such a personal insight into other’s private space.  Here, Bennett has provided us with the opportunity to literally get inside another person’s head.

Press release 1998

Locker Cable Street Open Studios, London 2000

“Locker” has three upright, adult sized compartments, each with its own full length door.  One side has a hole for a penis and the opposite side has two holes for breasts.  Both sides have a nose shaped hole, with a pair of lenses above.  

Lit from within, the glinting lenses beckon to us, with the compulsion of a peep show.  The rubber lined nose hole facilitates the shape of our face, as we press up close, to look through the lenses, at the stereoscopic image inside.  

The image we see is disconcerting, a nose and other body parts are protruding from the very locker we are pressed up to.  This provokes a strange out-of-body sensation, in which we feel somehow complicit.  

Encountered in a gallery context, “Locker” could be interpreted as a traditional figurative sculpture, simplifying the human form and accentuating male / femaleness.  Encountered in some other context the furniture’s sexual modifications may alarm or excite us.  The work is undoubtably a remarkable transmogrification of an unremarkable piece of utilitarian furniture, both comic and sinister.